The BBC List

The list below is alleged to be from the BBC with the statement that "The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here." I'm not if that is an aggregate for everyone including those who have not pursued higher education or if that is including those who have pursued higher education and essentially didn't read anything they were supposed to in college.

I mean to say if you didn't go through Freshman English in high school or college then maybe you haven't read more than six of these books. Well, maybe you didn't go to the college I went to where Freshman year you read a book a week in Colloquium, wrote a paper or essay a week in English 101 and then if you wanted to live up to Vita Abundantior you ended up taking at least two more literature courses that required reading and writing a book every two weeks.

That being said, I am also a reader of books so I tend to have read more than the average bear. So below I have marked those I have read. This is yet another list of books I need to start checking when trying to find a book to read.

How do your reading habits stack up?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -Yes-I think about 8 times. Love it
2The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien-No-I have started this many times but just haven't gotten into it.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Yes-Another I go back to often
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling-Yes
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Yes
6 The Bible-Yes
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -Yes
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -No
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -No
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens-Yes
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -Yes
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –Yes-It was a miserable story to read.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller –Yes
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare-No
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -Yes-I love how the story turns
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -No
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -No
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Yes-This is one of my favorites.
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger-Yes-This was one of the weirdest I've read and I wasn't that impressed with it.
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -No
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -Yes
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Yes-This is another of my favorites. Which are you? A Faulkner or a Fitzgerald?
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -No
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -Yes
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -Yes
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -Yes-Senior year of high school English class
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -Yes-Unfortunately Joad is not my favorite.
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll-No
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame-Yes-Wylie LOVED it as we read it aloud
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -Yes
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -Yes
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -Yes-Caveat-I haven't read the entire series but I have read five of the books.
34 Emma-Jane Austen -Yes
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -Yes
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -Yes
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -Yes-Haunting story
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -Yes
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -Yes
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - No
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -Yes
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -Yes
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving-Yes
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -No
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery-Yes
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -No-After Tess I will not read Hardy again.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -Yes
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -Yes-Freshman year high school
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan-Yes
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel-No
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -No-Attempted but did not make it through
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons-Yes
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -Yes
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -No
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -No
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - No
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -Yes
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon-No
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -Yes
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -Yes
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov-Yes
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -Yes
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -Yes-So sad and so amazing at the same time.
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas-Yes-UNABRIDGED VERSION!
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -Yes-Okay, so what was so great about this book? I think the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was much more interesting.
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -No
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding-Yes
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie –Yes
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -No
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens-No
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -No
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -Yes-Glorious escapism YES
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -Yes
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -Yes
76 The Inferno – Dante-Yes-College for two different courses. Had to read Boccaccio's Decamaron too.
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -No
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -No
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray-Yes-A glorious three days of not eating or breathing in order to finish this book. It was wonderful.
80 Possession - AS Byatt – No
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -Yes-And shorter than the movies.
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -No
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker-No
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -No
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -No
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -No
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -Yes
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-Yes-Every last one!
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton-No
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -Yes
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -Yes
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -No
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams-No
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -Yes
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -No
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -Yes
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare-No
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl -Yes
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo-Yes

So what does all this say about me? I've read 63 of the books above.
If you were to summarize the books I've read into three areas:
1. Historical dramas with a flair for the Russian and English tendency to less than ideal outcomes
2. Whimsy and Fantasy with a strong grounding in life lessons
3. Mystery!

If you were to summarize the books I have not read into three areas:
1. Science Fiction-Just doesn't work for me.
2. Several I'm not familiar with so I have some reading to do
3. Even having a heavy reading requirement in college I still have not read some of the "classics"

I hope this gives you another list to consider when trying to figure out the next book to read, and ALL OF THESE are available at our local libraries!